Hasta La Gadget!

Jan 27

Apple’s Tablet E-Book App Rips off Indie Dev’s Creation

Posted in: Apple, e-books, ipad, Media Players, tablets, Today's Chili

We love the iPhone book-reading app Classics, and apparently Apple does, too. The iPad tablet includes an app called iBooks, and its similarities to Classics are beyond the realm of coincidence.

The UI is the same idea: a shelf of books that you can tap to choose a title. The pages emulate the look of a printed book page. The 3D page-flipping effect looks almost exactly the same. The only major difference is iBooks has a tool to change font point and type. That and, of course, access to e-books in the iBooks store, which will feature titles from Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette book group. (Classics’ book content is an aggregation of public-domain materials from Project Gutenberg.)

But for the most part, it’s still the classic story of big-corporation-rips-off-independent-business. (And Apple wasn’t the first to borrow Classics’ idea, either.) And this has happened a few times in the mobile app space. A few months ago, Wired.com reported on two developers who were stomped when they inadvertently competed with Apple, as well as one developer whose project was squashed when Google came out with the same idea and offered it for free.

Ryu also acknowledges that Classics’ bookshelf view was heavily inspired by Delicious Library, but he asked Delicious Library creator Wil Shipley for approval before Classics’ release.

Of course, that doesn’t put Classics out of business. It’s unclear whether iBooks will be ported over to the iPhone, or whether it will be an exclusive app on the tablet.

Phillip Ryu, who helped create Classics, said he felt a little hurt, but as a loyal fan of Apple, he isn’t planning on picking a fight.

“It stung a bit as a huge fan of Apple, but in the end it’s a page flip,” Ryu told Wired.com. “We’ll come up with something cooler and let them take this digital reading experience to the next level with iBooks.”

Ryu has made Classics free for a limited time, adding “We figured it’s a good idea to get Classics into as many hands as possible, before people start calling it an iBooks ripoff.”

Classics Download Link [iTunes]